[Info-vax] Infoserver 150

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-10-20 12:37, John Wallace wrote:
> On Oct 20, 10:49 am, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> wrote:
>> On 2012-10-20 02:08, George Cornelius wrote:
>>
>>> In article <k5sfin$eu... at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> writes:
>>>> On 2012-10-19 22:42, VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
>>>>> In article <aedrmsF60f... at mid.individual.net>, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>>>>>> Once I have it up and running, can a PDP-11 boot off of it, too?
>>
>>>>> That I do not know.
>>
>>>> The answer is "no". :-)
>>>> Some PDP-11s do know how to netboot, but only using MOP.
>>>> As far as I've understood infoservers, they are more than just MOP boot
>>>> servers...
>>
>>> A common use of Infoservers was for booting terminal servers.  Load
>>> on a host could get rather high if all terminal servers in a large
>>> building or campus rebooted due to a power failure.
>>
>> Aha. Cool. I didn't know that.
>>
>>> I don't see why a PDP-11 could not boot from them if it could
>>> boot via MOP.
>>
>> Right. If an Infoserver can serve DECserver, then it can also serve a
>> PDP-11.
>>
>>> Of course, the disk serving protocols inuse (LAD and LAST)
>>> would probably be completely foreign to a PDP11 O/S. Still,
>>> you could likely load diagnostics or RSX11S boot images.
>>
>> Thanks. LAD and LAST were the things I was thinking of earlier, without
>> remembering the names. Yes, those protocols are not known in the PDP-11
>> world today.
>> And RSX11S is the only PDP-11 OS I know of which was pretty much
>> designed for netbooting, except of course things like terminal servers...
>>
>>          Johnny
>
> Whether Bill's goals are achievable may depend on what the PDP11
> expects after the first part of boot. As you say, RSX11S would network
> boot, and in order to that properly e.g. configure DECnet and so on,
> wasn't there more to it than just the initial MOP download? Will an
> Infoserver 150 do that for an 11S client? (I don't know much about
> RSX11S but for a while I looked after a couple of products that used
> 11S-based systems as data concentrator boxes; the necessary bits were
> easy with Phase IV DECnet on VMS as the boot host, but that isn't
> quite what we have in this picture).

No, there is nothing more done after the image have been downloaded, as 
far as networking is concerned. RSX-11S is diskless. All the programs 
you might want to run are already in the image you download, as well as 
all configuration you might do, and what not. -11S is pretty much just a 
case of a single large binary activated, and it is self contained.
You can have DECnet installed on it, but that is also then already 
loaded and activated in the saved image.

> I know Busybox is small, but I'd have imagined DECservers of the
> 100/200/etc family were even smaller.

Busybox is not an operating system. It is basically a shell, with all 
kind of commands compiled into the same image. It needs a Unix system to 
run on.

I would definitely suspect that you'll not fit all parts needed into the 
restricted memory of a DECserver, but I don't know for sure.

	Johnny